Version control

Dr Maeve Murphy Quinlan

What is version control?

  • Often described as “track changes”, although that’s not quite right
  • A super-powerful “undo” button
  • A way of working collaboratively without over-writing each other’s work
  • A way of recording exactly what you did and when

What is version control?

One way of doing version control…

What is version control?

  • We’re going to use git, which is a strangely named version control software
  • We’ll use this to explain how version control works, and why it matters
  • There are lots of other ways to do version control, but git is very widely used
    • If version control was word processing, git would be Microsoft Word

What does git do?

  • git allows you to bundle up changes to various files, and give the group of changes a unique commit hash and an explanatory message.
  • git works on a project level, so you can make a bunch of changes to different files in a folder, and then commit all those changes with a descriptive message
  • It’s recorded that you made those changes, and there’s a unique commit hash that you can quote to point at the exact state of your folder when you added those changes.